Prison camps for immigrant families
Some folks on the Frontera List today criticized my choice of words in calling out the Trump administration’s plan to violate the Flores settlement agreement and to hold families and children in long-term detention. See:
Trump administration to circumvent court limits on detention of child migrants
This move will definitely spur more investment and construction of long-term detention facilities–much of it already underway in the border region where I live. In a serious plug for Mark Dow’s excellent 2005 book, American Gulag, I advocate for the hashtag #Americangulag. I think it is reasonable to call these new and expanded immigration detention facilities internment camps, or even concentration camps.
A list member wrote in response:
“I think we need to come up with a new name as internment camp, concentration camp and gulag all invoke other history, motivation and circumstance. To me it needs to be something that encapsulates the fact that we’ve made migrants into a commodity for corporate profit. Also something that belies the fact that once profit is part of the equation the impetus to solve our border issues (whatever solve might mean) is diminished or removed entirely. Just like the border security industrial complex, once you create an economy, it becomes very hard to dismantle it.”
These are excellent points, but I am invoking the other history on purpose because I think the parallels are real. For…
